It's starting to look like the end of an era for Ubuntu users as Canonical mull the creation of an ISO that won't fit onto a CDR. The question is, does it matter? Canonical owes at least part of its success with Ubuntu Linux to the unique way that it has been distributed. From the start it has been available as a downloadable ISO image and a free CD, posted at no cost to the user. This was great news for people who wanted to install Linux but did not have the luxury of a decent Internet connection. In a sense, installing via a CDR image has always been like a kind of cache, in that you're moving part of the content that you need onto permanent storage rather than pulling it through the network connection

Why not have two different versions of the product - a 'Lite' version for those still living out in the sticks with a dialup connection, and a 'humpty dumpty' deluxe version for everyone else. That's better than the 7+ different versions that Windows has

For most distros, it's not two versions, because most distros already ship multiple live images for different desktops. So it's not two images rather than one image, but, say, eight images rather than four. That's a significant difference in terms of release engineering, QA, documentation, and even site design.